Preparation works required to produce a housing studies dissertation proposal

Preparation works required to produce a housing studies dissertation proposal (information to my supervisees):


1. Study the module guide on dissertation, especially on the proposal template. Note the key sections and key words of the proposal; if you are not familiar with the relevant research methods concepts, use Youtube to search for some relevant brief videos to watch.

2. Do some literature search to browse through some academic articles, books, newspaper articles, consultancy reports and university dissertation reports on your chosen housing theme (an academic-cum-practical one). You need a lot of academic articles so that you are able to choose around 20 academic articles to be considered at the proposal stage. While you could use readings from various sources, you need to have at least 20 academic articles from authoritative journals for directly informing your proposal formulation. Obviously, many of these academic articles should be from the field of the "Built Environment", notably on urban study, housing, and human (notably) urban geography. Other academic articles could be from sociology, social sciences, urban development, town planning, etc..... Remember this: you could use dissertation reports and textbooks, etc... but it is important to make use of 20 academic articles at the proposal planning stage. [Dissertation reports, textbooks and newspaper articles are not substitutes of academic articles]. Ideally, if you have 100 academic articles gathered via literature search (chiefly from university e-library), then you could more easily selected 20 good quality academic articles from them to be used in your proposal.

3. Try to study some articles on the agile literature review approach; in subsequent meetings, I will guide you to construct a pair of housing-concern diagram and an associated theoretical framework diagram. They are vital to your dissertation work.

4. I estimate that you have less than 1 month to produce a dissertation proposal at this point; thus, the proposal preparation task has to be done with some time pressure. Do not produce a draft proposal without the preparation efforts I mention above.